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| Real Estate & Land |
Land Through the Generations
Daniel Gross
06/01/2004
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It fell to John D.
Rockefeller Jr., known as Junior, to give away the vast fortune his father
amassed, and land was a central part of his philanthropic strategy. Functioning
as a type of one-man Interior Department, Junior donated thousands of acres of
wilderness on Mt. Desert Island in Maine to help form Acadia National Park. He
bought 33,562 acres in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and presented them to President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt as another park in 1943. In Manhattan, the family’s
home base, Junior donated the land on which his grand townhouse sat to the
Museum of Modern Art.
A similar civic commitment lay behind the origin of
Rockefeller Center. In 1928, Junior signed on to a scheme to build a new home
for the Metropolitan Opera Company. The opera house was to be the centerpiece of
a larger complex that would cover 12 acres in Midtown Manhattan on land owned by
Columbia University. Junior agreed to rent the land for $3.6 million a year for
24 years. But when then the stock market crashed, the opera pulled out of the
deal, and Rockefeller was left exposed to $124 million in lease payments—a
significant sum, even to a Rockefeller. “It was clear that there were only two
courses open to me,” Junior said. “One was to abandon the entire development.
The other was to go forward with it in the definite knowledge that I myself
would have to build it and finance it alone.”
Junior poured a large portion
of his family’s fortune into the complex, financing the balance with a
$65-million loan from Metropolitan Life Insurance. In July 1931, RCA agreed to
become an anchor tenant for a 56-story office building. Next came the 6,000-seat
Radio City Music Hall. Meanwhile, companies and charities associated with the
Rockefellers and Standard Oil filled the satellite buildings in the complex. By
1939, when Junior punched in the last of the rivets, he had spent $125
million—and provided 75,000 jobs in the teeth of the Depression.
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